The Handmaid's Tale of Coalition Britain

Jeremy Hunt's recently-voiced and ill-founded opinion on abortion adds insult to injury. Coalition austerity policies and attacks on women's rights mean that day by day
Britain is becoming no country for women.

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After
the British Minister for Health, Jeremy Hunt, said in a newspaper
interview earlier this month that his personal view is that “12 weeks is
the right point” for a limit on abortion – a drastic reduction from the
24 weeks limit
set by the Human Embryo and Fertilisation Act of 1990 – conversations
turned grim. Perhaps most surreal was the concern in pro-Conservative
quarters that Jeremy Hunt’s comments were ill-timed, given that it was the week of the Conservative Party Conference,
where Prime Minister David Cameron was due to declare his commitment to
the National Health Service, the small matter of decimating cuts aside. Others noted that Hunt, the Minister of Health, was giving an opinion
that had no basis in scientific evidence, and pro-choice campaigners
expressed their outrage that women’s right to their reproductive health
was being called into question. Cameron was put in the position of
awkwardly defending Hunt’s statements whilst reassuring the public that
any vote would be a “free vote” in Parliament.

The
comments raise the concern that the government does not have a
commitment to women’s rights and choices at heart, and that the hard-won
rights of the last forty years – the basic recognition that women need
and deserve to control their own fertility – could be corroded against
public opinion and against medical advice. It is deeply concerning that
a Minister for Health would express an opinion that goes against the
position of medical professionals – for the British Medical Association
has called upon MPs to vote against any attempt to reduce the 24 week
to 20 weeks, stating that there is no “scientific justification” for
such a reduction.

There
was also something peculiar in how Hunt spoke out in favour of a limit
that is even more extreme than the stated support for the curtailment of
reproductive rights from other Conservative MPs that had come earlier
in the month, namely Maria Miller’s
declared support for a reduction of the abortion limit from 24 weeks to
20 weeks. There is a danger of sounding conspiracy theory-ish in
frustration at such attacks on hard-won and necessary rights of
reproductive health, but it is
difficult not to wonder – perhaps Hunt and others who have been
muddying public discourse with their personal ‘preferred’ abortion limit
these last weeks (“I’d like 12 weeks!” “I’d like 20!” “I’d like women
to only have abortions on Tuesdays and only if they feel really guilty
about it!”) hoped that the result would be that, when the proposal of 20
weeks is put on the table it won’t seem ‘so bad’ in comparison to the
more extreme positions voiced by Tory politicians, or public debate will
be so exhausted by the arguments involved in re-opening the abortion
issue that they will acquiesce, tiredly seeing 20 weeks as a
‘compromise’.

Whether
this is what Hunt intended or not, he has now put himself up alongside
Maria Miller as a symbol of a new state attack on women’s bodies.
‘Orwellian’ is an easily misused phrase, but something about the news
this month smelt of drab, shabby English-autumn grime mingled with
unreal dystopia: imagine – your country’s ‘Minister for Health’ making
statements about a woman’s right to choose on the basis of no scientific
evidence; your country’s ‘Minister for Women and Equality’ voicing her approval
for the curtailing of reproductive choice. Yes, it should be
acknowledged that Hunt was only giving his personal opinion, but this
doesn’t negate the impression that the people appointed to protect women
and health seem, between them, to show little concern for women’s
health. As well as ignoring the statistics that the vast majority of abortions
take place in the very early stages of pregnancy, with 79% before the
10 week gestation period, the debate also ignored the more qualitative
and complex issue reproductive health workers have pointed out – that
the reasons for late abortions are very difficult, not to mention the
fact that gaps in health service provisions are often what makes the
process of seeking a termination take longer for women, something that
would surely be exacerbated as cuts to health services
continue to bite. Yet there were no statements from the Ministers for
Health or Women on positive ways to reduce the number of abortions, such
as improving access to contraception for all age groups – the Minister
for Health and the Minister for Women confined themselves to their
various opinions on to what extent they would like to remove women’s
ability to control their own bodies. That’s what I mean by Orwellian.

The
context in which Hunt’s comments come feels viscerally painful, like
being assaulted when you’re already physically weakened. For these
latest attacks on women’s reproductive health come at a time when
British women have already been worn down, infringed upon, pushed aside,
and trodden on by policy after policy. In addition to the ways in
which the recession corroded women’s lives to a greater extent than
previous downturns due to the rise of female-headed households and
female employment over the past ten years, the Conservatives have
utilised the supposed ‘neutrality’ of austerity cuts (“we’re all in it
together and want to get out of the recession”) to enact its own vision
of society – the cuts to SureStart and welfare provisions combine with the decimation of provisions such as domestic violence services to add insult to injury
as women (and families, and parents, and children – for an attack on
women’s rights always knocks a long chain of painful dominoes) continue
to reel from the economic bite of the recession.

This
latest possible attack on reproductive rights is perhaps the logical
conclusion to the vision the government has carved on the face of
British public life in the guise of ‘austerity’ measures – women have
already been attacked economically, socially, and politically.
After losing your job and losing much of the health, education and
welfare services needed for you and your family, here comes the last
instalment – lose the right to control your own fertility.

It
makes one wonder, how exactly is a woman expected to be, in the Tory
vision? One of the most striking examples of how the government cuts
have started to play out, which emerged over the summer, are the impact
of cuts to maternity provisions. With the disproportionately high level
of female unemployment (due in part to the disproportionate employment
of women in the public sector, first on the chopping block when the
austerity measures came in), and the cuts to services which are vital
for many women’s lives, it seems fair to say that many Conservatives
exalt full-time motherhood as an ideal. Yet data emerged earlier this summer from health analysts SSentif to suggest that cuts are affecting maternity services,
with a knock-on effect on the health of mothers and their newborn
children. Between female unemployment on the one hand, gendered
austerity cuts on the other, and with the possible corrosion of
reproductive rights on the table, the decline in the quality of
maternity services is the factor that really seals the overall picture
that things are progressing into some kind of Margaret Atwood dystopia
-- motherhood exalted as the ideal while motherhood itself is less safe.
How, exactly, is a woman meant to be a person in this climate, so
cleverly penned in by encroachments in all areas of her life?

The
same issue can be raised with the impact of the estimated £20 billion
in welfare cuts by 2014 and Iain Duncan Smith’s latest
Victorian-caricature proposal that the unemployed only receive benefits for no more than two children:
the concern about the ‘sanctity of life’ that gets raised to curtail
women’s reproductive rights does not seem to manifest much in concern
for the lives of those living in Britain now.

As
the American election gears up for its final week, all brash and
bright and alpha, women’s bodies have been the terrain of political
battles between the two main parties, with liberals characterising the
Republican party, or at least sections of it, as engaged in a ‘war on women’, and telling women to “vote as if your life depends on it”
this November. But it is happening here in Britain too – in our
understated, dreary way, but in a way that still stitches itself into
daily life – if you have children there are fewer libraries to take them
to, the precarity of temporary employment
is often your only option for work, and -- as your remuneration for
toughing out the recession, your increasing marginalisation from power
and the unequal austerity measures -- your government will reward you
with removing your right to choose. Day by day, corrosion by corrosion,
Britain is becoming no country for women.

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